Andres laughs. “You’d fit right in.”
Lore feels quaint. She’s only ever known people with degrees in solid, practical subjects, if they have degrees at all. “What is philosophy . . . for?”
“For?”
“You know. People study business to work in business. Finance to work in finance.”
“Ah.” Andres kicks a branch out of their way. “Do people study philosophy to become philosophers?”
“Right. And what do philosophers . . . do?” Lore hates how her questions are emerging, ignorant and a bit judgmental. Once, she’d told her father she wanted to learn French, and he’d stared at her before erupting in big, laughing-at-her laughter. In Laredo? he’d scoffed. You want to learn how to snowshoe, too? She hadn’t realized she had this part of him in her. “I’m sorry,” she starts.
“Don’t be. Philosophy can seem abstract, but it’s actually about things that influence our everyday lives: reason, language, existence, values. Is there a best way to live? Is it better to be just or unjust, if you can get away with it? What does it mean,” he adds, with a smile, “to be ‘good’?”
Lore starts, remembering their conversation at the wedding table. Robinson Crusoe.
“Believe it or not,” he says, “philosophy has given us Isaac Newton’s work, which is now classified as physics. It’s given us disciplines like psychology, sociology, linguistics—even,” he adds, “economics. And while many students of philosophy go on to academia, others practice law or journalism, or even, God help us, politics. To study philosophy is to learn how to be curious, to think critically, to ask questions, to reason. At least, that’s what I hope to teach my students.”
Lore can’t help but think of Fabian, who would see philosophy as self-indulgent and unnecessary. They live in a world of things, after all. A world of iron and heat, solid and understandable. And yet, look at the recession: What is money if not an idea? An idea with the power to liberate or enslave.
Fabian. Right now, he’s sleeping alone in the queen-size bed they bought so proudly as newlyweds, whose oak headboard Lore religiously cleans with lemon Pledge every Sunday, just like Mami taught her. Fabian, who trusts her without question, because she’s never given him reason not to. Fabian, her first love, whom she’d always believed would be her only love.
And yet here she is, walking so close to Andres she can feel the heat of his body, and when he slides an arm around her shoulders, asking, “Cold?,” she nods, her arm slipping around his waist as if disconnected from her mind.
Lore suddenly blurts, “I’ve never done this before.”
“What?” Andres smiles. “Ridden off with a stranger to a secluded park in a foreign city in the middle of the night?”
She croaks a laugh. “Yes. That.”
“Your mother wouldn’t approve?” he teases.
Lore startles, then remembers saying Mami would kill her for getting on the bike. She can hear Mami’s voice now, the clarity of her disappointment: ?Lore, qué estás haciendo? For a moment, she can’t breathe.
Andres stops. “Hey,” he says softly. “I’m sorry, is she—has she passed?”
Lore swallows, and there is no reason for what she says next except that a part of her must know. A part of her is already building the scaffolding.
“It’s just hard for me to think about her sometimes,” she says. “What about you? Did your parents approve of you being a philosopher?”
“My father was a surgeon. He expected me to be a different kind of doctor.”
“You’re a doctor.” Lore tries to move past her implication that her mother is dead with a joke. “I feel bad, calling you by your first name all night.”
“So you should,” Andres says. “‘Doctor’ only from now on, please.”
“Very well, Doctor,” Lore quips, and then she has another moment of heart-stopping recrimination. What is she doing flirting, walking arm in arm with this man, this stranger, in the middle of the night? She pulls away slightly, letting the cool air fill the space between them. “And your mother?”
“She would have approved of anything I did, if only I’d done it in Buenos Aires.”
“I guess all mothers want their children close.” Lore thinks of Gabriel and Mateo, who feel very far away in this moment.
Lore asks him about Buenos Aires, and Andres tells her about growing up in La Recoleta, where the rich had fled to avoid yellow fever at the end of the nineteenth century. “You should see it one day,” Andres says, and she is startled by his image of her, a woman who might go places she’s never been. When he tells her about the cemetery, all she can picture is the cemetery on Saunders, which is a nice enough place to be dead but sounds nothing like what Andres describes: five thousand above-ground mausoleums, elaborate monuments made of marble imported from Paris and Milan, marble so shiny the living can see their reflections in statues of the dead. When he was a boy and wanted to escape his mother’s suffocating love, he used to go there.
Lore tells him how, back when she’d wanted to be Robinson Crusoe, she’d felt a seed of wildness in her, something that didn’t belong. Sometimes she walked out to the railroad tracks and waited in the middle for the shiver to start beneath her feet, for the glare of headlights to fill her vision. She waited for the horn to sound, an elephant’s trumpet wail, for the shriek of metal on metal, and imagined her skeleton rattling beneath her skin, trapped and giddy as pebbles jumped at her ankles. Finally, at the last possible moment, she leaped aside, laughing as she picked stickers off her bare arms and legs. The high lasted for weeks afterward. While everyone else was numbly performing the rituals of their days, she was fully alive, because she’d chosen to be.
She tells Andres about Hurricane Alice, the 1954 storm meteorologists had predicted would cause “moderate” flooding, when in reality the Rio Grande swelled to a monstrous sixty-one feet, the second highest crest ever recorded. She was too young to remember it, but in an inexplicable postcard Mami had shown her, the muddy water was thick as cement, swallowing the new four-lane bridge so that only the red-roofed turret of a building stuck out like a hand waving for help. They’d had to destroy the remnants of the bridge with dynamite, Mami told her, in order to build a new one. For the next two years, people risked their lives crossing by canoe.
Lore used to ask Mami to tell her the story of the flood, as if it were a dark fairy tale. But she never told her mother about the dreams, each one the same, even now: Lore trapped in that cement-thick water, the pressure building until it eventually wrenches her apart and she becomes liquid, a part of the flood, engulfing roads and cars and homes, sending trees crashing onto roofs, collecting debris with a mighty, destructive force. It’s this destructiveness Lore remembers when she wakes—the pleasure of it, the power. The closest she’s come to feeling it in real life was when she gave birth to the cuates, roaring as her body ripped, swimming in unnameable fluid. And somehow women are expected to forget this afterward, how they are the closest thing to God, breaking themselves open to create new life. Motherhood is supposed to be quiet and pretty. But motherhood is not pretty. Motherhood has teeth.